Discovery and Exploitation of New Biases in RC4

Discovery and Exploitation of New Biases in RC4 Pouyan Sepehrdad, Serge Vaudenay and Martin Vuagnoux EPFL CH–1015 Lausanne, Switzerland http://lasecwww.epfl.ch Abstract. In this paper, we present several weaknesses in the stream cipher RC4. First, we present a technique to automatically reveal linear correlations in the PRGA of RC4. With this method, 48 new exploitable correlations have been discovered. Then we bind these new biases in the PRGA with known KSA weaknesses to provide practical key recovery attacks. Henceforth, we apply a similar technique on RC4 as a black box, i.e. the secret key words as input and the keystream words as output. Our objective is to exhaustively find linear correlations between these elements. Thanks to this technique, 9 new exploitable correlations have been revealed. Finally, we exploit these weaknesses on RC4 to some practical examples, such as the WEP protocol. We show that these correlations lead to a key recovery attack on WEP with only 9800 encrypted packets (less than 20 seconds), instead of 24200 for the best previous attack. 1 Introduction RC4 is a stream cipher designed by Ronald Rivest in 1987. It had initially been a trade secret until the algorithm was anonymously posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list in September 1994. Nowadays, RC4 is still widely used: it is the default cipher of the SSL/TLS protocol and a cryptographic primitive of the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) protocols. Its popularity probably comes from its simplicity and the low computational cost of the encryption and decryption operations. Due to its straightforwardness, RC4 sparked extensive research, revealing weaknesses in case of misuse. The most famous example is the attack on the WEP protocol used in IEEE 802.11. WEP was designed to provide confidentiality on wireless communications by using RC4. In order to simplify the key set up, WEP uses fixed keys. In wireless communications, packets may be easily lost. Because of the lack of transport control at the link level, IEEE 802.11 designers chose to encrypt each packet independently. However, RC4 is a stream cipher: the same secret key must never be used twice. To prevent any key repetition, WEP concatenates an initialization vector (IV) to the key, where the IV is a 24-bit value which is publicly disclosed in the header of the protocol. This particu- lar use of RC4 is subject to many weaknesses. However, RC4 is not generally used with an IV and almost all the attacks concerning WEP cannot be applied to the plain RC4. Thus, RC4 is still believed to be secure, even if many weaknesses have been explored. 1.1 Description of RC4 The stream cipher RC4 consists of two algorithms: the Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) and the Pseudo Random Generator Algorithm (PRGA). The KSA generates an initial state from a random key K of ` words of n bits as described in Algorithm 1. It starts with an array f0;1;:::;N − 1g, where N = 2n and swaps N pairs, depending on the value of the secret key K. At the end, we obtain the initial state SN−1. Algorithm 1 RC4 Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) 1: for i = 0 to N − 1 do 2: S[i] i 3: end for 4: j 0 5: for i = 0 to N − 1 do 6: j j + S[i] + K[i mod `] mod N 7: swap(S[i],S[ j]) 8: end for Algorithm 2 RC4 Pseudo Random Generator Algorithm (PRGA) 1: i 0 2: j 0 3: loop 4: i i + 1 mod N 5: j j + S[i] mod N 6: swap(S[i],S[ j]) 7: keystream word zi = S[S[i] + S[ j] mod N] 8: end loop Once the initial state SN−1 is created, it is used by the second algorithm of RC4, the PRGA. Its role is to generate a keystream of words of n bits, which will be XORed with the plaintext to obtain the ciphertext. Thus, RC4 computes the loop of the PRGA each time a new keystream word zi is needed, according to Algorithm 2. Note that each time a word of the keystream is generated the internal state of RC4 is updated. Notation. In this paper, we define all the operators such as addition, subtraction and multiplication in the group Z=NZ. Thus, x + y should be read as (x + y) mod N. The indices of the table respect the C-style programming reference. This means that the first entry of the table has the index 0. Let Si[k] denote the value of the array S at index k, after round i in KSA. S−1 denotes the array where S[i] = i, where i = 0;1;:::;N − 1. −1 Let Si [p] be the index of the value p in the array S after round i in KSA. For example, −1 −1 0 Si [Si[k]] = k and Si[Si [p]] = p. Let ji (resp. ji) be the value of j during the round i of KSA (resp. PRGA) where the rounds are indexed with respect to i. Thus, the KSA 0 has rounds 0;1;:::;N − 1 and the PRGA has rounds 1;2;:::. Let Si denote the array S th 0 after the i round of the PRGA (i.e. S1 is equal to SN−1 with SN−1[1] and SN−1[SN−1[1]] 0 swapped). We also denote SN−1 = S0. In this paper, RC4 is always used with N = 256. Thus, instead of words we may use bytes, which are equivalent. The keystream zi is defined by 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 zi = Si[Si[i] + Si[ ji] mod N] = Si[Si−1[ ji] + Si−1[i] mod N] (1) 2ip Let p be an integer and q = e p . Unless otherwise mentioned, G denotes the Zp group. The Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a function f over Gs is defined as fˆ(c) = ∑ f (x)q−c•x x2Gs where • is the dot product. Previous Work. There are two approaches in the study of cryptanalysis of RC4: attacks based on the weaknesses of the KSA and attacks based on the weaknesses of the PRGA. Concerning the KSA, one of the first weakness published on RC4 was discovered by 0 Roos [28] in 1995. This correlation binds the secret key bytes to the initial state S0. Roos [28] and Wagner [34] identified classes of weak keys which reveal the secret key if the first key bytes are known. This property has been largely exploited against WEP (see [5,9,2,15,16,32,30,29]). Another study of cryptanalysis of the KSA is the secret key 0 recovery when the initial state S0 is known [25,1]. On the PRGA, The analysis has been largely motivated by distinguishing attacks [7,6,19,21] or initial state reconstruction from the keystream bytes [8,31,14,22] with complexity of 2241 for the best state recovery attack. Relevant studies of the PRGA reveal biases in the keystream output bytes in [20,27]. Mironov in [23] recommends that the first 512 initial keystream bytes must be discarded to avoid these weaknesses. Jenkins published in 1996 on his website [11] two biases in the PRGA of RC4. These biases have been generalized by Mantin in his Master Thesis [18] as useful states. Paul, Rathi and Maitra [26] discovered in 2008 a biased output index of the first keystream word generated by the PRGA. Ultimately, the last bias on the PRGA has been experimentally discovered by Maitra and Paul [17]. In practice, key recovery attacks on RC4 must bind KSA and PRGA weaknesses to correlate secret key words to keystream words. Some biases on the PRGA [13,26,17] have been successfully bound to the Roos correlation [28] to provide known plaintext attacks. Our Contributions. Since, almost all known PRGA correlations have been experimentally found, we propose a method to exhaustively reveal new weaknesses in the PRGA. From 4 known biases in the PRGA, we have found 48 additional new exploitable correlations thanks to this technique. To provide key recovery attacks on RC4, we must bind KSA and PRGA weaknesses, we show that some of these new correlations can be bound to KSA vulnerabilities and lead to new key recovery attacks. Subsequently, we present another technique which does not consider the KSA and the PRGA, but only RC4 as a black box with the secret key words as input and the keystream words as output. Similar to the previous technique, we exhaustively search for correlations to rediscover the 3 known biases. Thanks to this technique, we have discovered 9 additional exploitable correlations between the secret key and the keystream words. Then, we exploit the known and new weaknesses against plain RC4 (with 48 first keystream words known by the attacker) and we obtain a key recovery attack with a complexity of 2122:06 instead of 2128 for RC4 with N = 256 and a key length of 16 bytes. We also show that some of these correlations can be applied to WEP, decreasing the number of required encrypted packets to 9800. The best previous key recovery attacks on WEP needed 24200 encrypted packets [32,29] for the same success probability. This permits to recover a WEP key of 104 bits with a passive ciphertext only attack in less than 20 seconds in practice. This new attack is the best key recovery on WEP to our knowledge. Structure of the Paper. In Section 2 we briefly explore known correlations in the PRGA of RC4.

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